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This is not correct. Sushi menus for restaurants in Tokyo use a mixture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

I've been living in Japan for over 5 years.

Japan has a serious problem with lack of sound proofing in most of the buildings you'll come across

In older or cheaper buildings this is true. However if you pay you can have better sound proofing. For example some Japanese mansions (residential low-rise condominiums) are built from reinforced concrete and isolate sound fairly well. You just have to be careful to read about the building and its construction. You also have to be willing to pay extra for better construction materials.

as well as some discrimination (not necessarily racism) you might find while looking for housing

This is true for rentals. I also want to clarify Japanese also experience discrimination so it is not purely a non-Japanese thing. Generally landlords have freedom to put whatever restrictions they want on who they rent the unit to. But this is for good reason. A landlord cannot easily evict a tenant. So the landlord is taking a huge risk in trusting that the tenant will respect the contract and actually pay the rent.

I will say in buildings owned by corporations or businesses, they sometimes don't have any discrimination by nationality. They do tend to have higher requirements for income and may discriminate based on your current company employment contract. Also they may require a specific guarantor company which tends to be more expensive. The guarantor company is sort of a risk insurance for the landlord paid by the tenant.

However things are quite different if you buy the land outright. Here the only restriction is bank loans. If you do not have permanent residence, the number of banks willing to lend money are very few. If you have permanent residence then you have many more banks to choose from. Otherwise there is no restriction on who can buy land.

Unless you have a company dealing with this stuff for you, you're going to have some headaches.

I think it is all about perspective and expectations. In Japan the Japanese are used to dealing with bureaucracy (though many Japanese also really dislike it). The information is readily available, you just have research yourself. Otherwise you have to accept that you are moving to a non-English speaking country and it is your responsibility to find a way to understand the local language or get someone to help you.

I do agree that there are still many headaches to adjust to Japanese business and culture. But I also don't understand why everyone has an expectation that Japan must change to meet their expectations. Japan is a first world country with many issues, but it isn't a place where you can expect to be free of first-world problems.

For example in the US nearly nobody bothers to complain about credit rating agencies. Maintaining your credit is seen as something you control. Which isn't necessarily true. Credit ratings greatly affect American lives. So everyone is in a way obligated to participate in a non-government created scheme yet nobody bats an eye. Just sign up for a credit card.

3rd party packages are already a problem because a github repo shouldn't be treated as a dependency source. Gomod solves some problems but still uses git repos as the source.

The primary reason Go can get away with this strategy is because the Go community actively promotes fewer dependencies = better. So if you write Go you have to often accept the fact that the second you add a 3rd party dependency that you're now officially on your own if that dependency breaks or becomes unsupported.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But in order to move software forward I still think we can do better than to push this responsibility to all individual end users.

This is one area where I feel like most popular languages today still fail compared to CPAN. CPAN's value was not just packaging and distribution, it was an integrated test report pipeline and infrastructure, actively managing and gatekeeping of library maintainers, CPAN mirroring functionality, and easy acceptance of bug reports and user feedback against a library.

I don't agree. The ruby community had a recent love affair with dsl. Taking a peak at rspec library source made my eyes bleed. There's also a huge preference for "magic" even outside of rails, so much that when you want to augment or add functionality you're supposed to monkey patch. There's also a huge preference for "clean" syntax when it doesn't necessarily improve maintainability--it just makes the number of odd syntax rules you have to learn and internalize more convoluted. Also I feel as though the reason there's so much preference for tests and strict rubocop is exactly because there are too many footguns baked into the language.

That's not to say other dynamically typed languages (including js) or even statically typed languages are all that much better. But I would say ruby is really showing its age with the number of warts and hacks that have accumulated.

This isn't accurate. It is more like:

Customer: I want a table with four legs.

Dev: Ok, give me 2 days and it is done. after 2 days Here's your particle board table about 1 meter off the ground with seating for 4.

Customer: Great, but it would be nice if it could seat 6 sometimes because we sometimes have guests.

Dev: Ok, give me half a week. 3 days pass Ok, here's your table for 6, we had to change the material to wood to make it more durable and unfortunately it increases the cost.

Customer: No way I'll pay extra for wood. What's wrong with particle board? And the texture of this wood is too noticeable, the texture has to be more subtle. And we want to minimize the size to a table of 4 when the guests are not around so we can have more floor space.

Dev: Ok but expandable tables are significantly more complex and I don't think we can do it with your cost contraints. Can you consider increasing the cost?

Customer: What are you talking about? When I asked the Indian shop down the road they said it was possible at this cost. Are you lying to me? If you don't fix this and deliver then I want my money back and I'll just go with the competition.

Dev: Ok, we obviously can't compete with that price so here's your refund. But we highly don't recommend that shop because you will have issues with the table.

Customer: I think everything will be fine. Good luck to you and don't try to upsell me.

6 months later

Customer: Here's the table the Indian shop built. It sometimes won't collapse and they can't figure out what's wrong with it. Can you fix it?

Dev: Ok, we can take a look... You see the problem is this rail design is not fit for these specifications. We can fix it temporarily but in order to fix it permanently we have to rebuild the table top surface which means only the legs will be reused.

Customer: What do you mean? Can't you just install new rails?

Dev: You see, particle board is too flexible a material so over time the fasteners will fail. That's why we recommend wood. But you didn't want to pay for that in the beginning so we didn't want to continue with the contract.

Customer: Fine! Fix it, we need the table next week for a dinner party. How much?

Dev: Our backlog indicates we're booked for the next month. So to prioritize this job we need additional compensation as we'll temporarily have to hire additional help to satisfy demand.

Customer: Are you crazy? I can get 2 new tables that don't expand for that price. This isn't rocket science, I'll find my own way.

6 months later

Customer: We need a table. We're ready to pay anything.

Dev: Oh, you're in luck. Expandable tables are now free of charge. We only charge an installation fee and optional warranty fee if you want us to fix potential issues after delivery. The only catch is they only come in white.

Customer: Excellent, but what about brown? And since it is so cheap now can't you make it height adjustable?

Dev: The brown configuration is a small additional fee but the height adjustable feature has to be made from scratch as it is new technology. It is quite expensive because the motors have not been validated yet, so we have to do a qualification test on each part.

Customer: what? just give me the white table and I'll go talk to the Indians again.

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Software often has expanding scope and new "innovative" requirements. It is almost never the case that we have a fixed deliverable; once the customer has a solution, they immediately want something else improved. This flexibility manifests on additional R&D costs for new or customized technology.

I'm not so sure what you're defining is completely different. Doing things the "right way" in Japan and other east asian cultures has more or less the same effect as trying to be "perfect" in American culture. The effect is both cultures encourage the individual to act in a manner they may not accept themselves. The difference being that in a conformist culture the avenues for self expression are limited by culture and society. In an ambition oriented culture the concept of "failure" has the same damaging effects.

This isn't to say that both traits, conformity and perfection are inherently bad, instead we should be teaching the purpose or reason to do so rather than blindly require the behavior without justification.

Google’s adoption of gradle has been a disaster and proved to be a terrible decision. It did help out with some previous issues, namely multiple app targets, but it’s slowed down compilation severely. It also makes for masochistic configuration files with major redundancy and fragmented dependency hosts. Getting an app to compile shouldn’t be a challenge.

To be fair iOS dependency management is also a huge pain. CocoaPods is worse than working with Gradle in my opinion.

If they were replacing the connector with a royalty free standard connector, then I'd be with you. But the reality is this is a proprietary connector play and if they win we'll all be paying while Apple profits. $9 isn't reasonable, it just increased the base price of all existing headphones while shifting a nice fat margin to Apple.

As for wireless I think many people think syncing and charging headphones is more hassle than just plugging in.

Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.

If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.

Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.

Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.

Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.

Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:

1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.

2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.

The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.

The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.

Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.

The first one:

If people's hopes of coding bug-free code in Python 2 actually panned out

Python2 developers wanted to write bug-free code.

code = for the purpose of processing text and binary data

then I wouldn't consistently hear from basically every person

Python2 developers could not write bug free code. So they complained.

complained = complained about their algorithms having bugs when they rewrote those algorithms in Python3

that they found latent bugs in their code regarding encoding and decoding of text and binary data.

Python2 code written by the same developers had bugs that they did not know about.

When the same developers rewrote their code in Python3, they found the bugs.

(If Python3 did not exist, then it would be very hard to write bug-free code in Python2.)

The second one:

We assumed that more code would be written in Python 3 than in Python 2 over a long-enough time frame assuming we didn't botch Python 3 as it would last longer than Python 2 and be used more once Python 2.7 was only used for legacy projects and not new ones.

If we designed Python 3 correctly, then we expect Python 3 to live longer than Python 2. We also expect more code to be written in Python 3 for the same reason. We also expect only old projects will be written in Python 2.7.

This is mainly second-hand information. I haven't worked at a Japanese company, the closest I've gotten was interviews and a sort of off the record job offer. I have lived in the country for 1 year though, so I definitely saw the actual hours friends were at work or busy because of work.

1. Japanese business culture sees labor laws as guidelines.

2. Being overworked (meaning enduring or working extra hours) is seen as a "good" thing.

3. Doing anything to sabotage the team effort (including working fewer hours, not being available, not asking to help others) is seen as the worst thing you could do.

4. Being granted a week off by your company is seen as generous (even though you may be allocated 2 or more weeks a year). The corollary to this is not taking your allocated vacation hours is seen as a good thing.

5. You don't miss work due to a cold, you put on a mask and show up anyway.

6. Punctuality is in some ways more important than doing the actual job. This is why people go through great efforts to jam into a single train in order to not be late by even 5 minutes.

7. Apologies are expected, more than reasons or explanations. The message your superior wants to hear isn't that you screwed up, it is that you are inferior and have no excuse and he is superior to you (hence an apology). This is a legacy of Japan's feudal days; Japanese large corporations are essentially the transformation of what used to be feudal powers.

8. Confrontation is avoided at great lengths. This is why Japanese have a hard time of saying "no". This implies that if your boss asks for work to be done, you will undoubtedly agree without complaint.

9. Women are paid significantly less than men, but the trade off is a woman can quit her job to rear children and not be "penalized" from a social standpoint. Men get paid more than women but Japanese culture expects that the man of the family will pay for his wife and children in full through retirement even if the woman doesn't work a single day.

10. Since men are the de facto breadwinner, and women often don't work to take care of the household/children, men are expected (even by their own families) to work longer hours in order to advance the entire family. It is not uncommon for the father of a family to live/work in a city 2-3 hours away from where his family resides.

11. "Black" company (in Japanese) is a term that refers to businesses that have mandatory overtime (12+ hour days). I guesstimate roughly half of all companies in Japan are Black companies.

12. Companies often have "Nomikai" (drinking parties). They are not mandatory per se, but like everything in Japan, social pressure is often used to force people to attend. This is considered a work function even though no actual work takes place.

13. Most employees in Japan are part of "sales". This doesn't imply selling a product, rather it means wining and dining to the customer (Business to Business). This includes things like taking the customer on dinners, karaoke, golf, etc all "on the house". Failure to do this mean strain on the customer relationship. Strain on the relationship implies loss of business.

14. There's a "right" way of doing everything. Japan is a society that values process and manners. For example when you, a Japanese national, go on an interview, and must enter an interview room, you first knock exactly 3 times, yell "excuse me", wait for an invitation, open the door, yell again "pardon me", then enter the room, promptly close the door, wait to be invited again to take a seat, then proceed to take the seat. Failure to do this correctly exactly as listed looks bad.

15. Japanese (the language) continues to require honorific/humble language in addition to polite language. In school, children must address students senior to themselves using polite language. In the workplace, employees must be able to address superiors and customers using honorific/humble language (a step above polite language, imagine talking to a king in the old days with English). Distant acquaintances and strangers must also be addressed with at a minimum polite language. Casual language is reserved for friends and family only. To be fair, this isn't just unique to Japan but is common in many East-Asian and nearby cultures.

16. If you want to avoid this hellish landscape and remain in Japan and still be respected, you do have one and only one option. Do well on your college entrance exams in high school, get into the top tier schools, then apply to the top companies and highly desired positions. This will spare you of regular mandatory overtime during your adult life, allow you to have better than average salary, and still be highly respected in society despite only working may an average 10 hours a weekday. Doing something else (like going abroad) is not seen as the "normal" way. Not being normal is not good. The only exceptions are English teachers, translators, and obviously affluent families (that would have been fine anyway). University students can also get away with study abroad, assuming they don't go more than a year and join the rest of their peers in the same job hunting style at the end of it. But these students may have already accepted that they are unlikely to land a good job so study abroad is seen as a way to delay the inevitable.

17. More and more Japanese are slowly just beginning to say "fuck it". This is leading to interesting subcultures. For example the term called "freeters" (shortening of English free-timers) is a culture of young Japanese that refuse to work standard salary jobs and instead work multiple part time jobs often taking breaks in employment to enjoy free time. More 20s and 30s Japanese are taking advantage of working holiday visa arrangements with other countries as an attempt to expatriate. More and more Japanese are negotiating or purposely deciding to only take jobs where they are allowed a fixed number of hours (often the cost is a reduction in pay or a not so great work assignment). But these groups are still very much the minority and there are definite sacrifices these people have made (or they're just mentally crazy) in the eyes of the typical Japanese.

Free parking is kind of mislabeled. The correct term is minimum parking requirements. Most build standards now enforce having a minimum amount of parking for any new building or housing development, including for low income housing.

In order to have mass transit work, we need to be able to build housing and businesses that have very little to no parking allocated. Minimum parking (along with level of service for roads) makes every business and house foot print larger, decreases density, and decreases pedestrian accessibility.

It wouldn't even be that hard to naturally enforce/encourage this. All we would have to do is eliminate minimum parking requirements for developments within a quarter mile radius of a mass transit station.

One would argue that would do essentially nothing. For example a wealthy condo owner would naturally want a parking space and thus pressure the developer to build a space. But I argue there is demand and will be more demand for this parking-less space today in very crowded cities (think SF) or in the future when younger generations or immigrants decide to live in high density areas.

I actually think we have things backwards with minimum parking compared to other cities like Tokyo. Minimum parking acts as a hidden subsidy that increases the price of the property. In Tokyo, houses can be sold without parking. But in order to own a car in Tokyo, you have to prove you also own a parking space. So many housing communities will have parking lots or shared parking garages where nearby residents can rent a space. (There also exist houses that are sold with attached parking as well, but it isn't a requirement.) This is essentially a free market solution to the problem where as the American minimum parking solution is a government regulated solution.

Even Tokyo has most of it's trains above ground. See Yamanote line with 29 stations versus the 16 cumulative underground stations that both the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit and Saitama Rapid Railway Line serve.

I've lived in Tokyo for a year, and this comment is grossly ignorant.

First of all, Tokyo Metro is just one subway company in the region. Tokyo Metro according to Wikipedia has 142 unique stations, most of which are underground.

For surface trains, the Yamanote loop line circles central Tokyo, with Chuo-Sobu cutting through the center. There are other surface trains that feed into central Tokyo but don't necessarily take you through Tokyo. There are some trains that also run along sections of the Yamanote line like the Keihin-Tohoku line and Saikyo line.

Other than those lines, if you want to travel around central Tokyo (within the area circled by Yamanote, you will most likely ride a Tokyo Metro subway (underground) or a Toei Subway (underground). Toei is the other major subway company in the region.

If anything, Japan and Tokyo is proof that SF and LA have no reason to not build subways despite their seismically active areas. Remember, Japan, including the Tokyo region, was hit with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake recently and many other high magnitude earthquakes in the last century alone. Tokyo is proof that earthquakes can be mitigated.

If there's one engineering failure of Tokyo it would be reclaimed land. A large portion of Tokyo (famously Odaiba, and Haneda Airport) are built on reclaimed land. This type of land shows problems especially due to earthquakes. For this reason residents tend to shy away from purchasing houses in these areas because there's a high risk of issues with the soil and foundations. But this makes perfect sense, reclaimed land is basically dumping dirt into what used to be water to make more land.

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The only way this comment gets remotely close to accurate is if it is counting for the entire Tokyo region and not just Central Tokyo. But this would be the equivalent of comparing the entire Bay area. Outside of central Tokyo, the trains do run on the surface. But Tokyo uses trains as a primary means of transportation so lines can continue for hours as they go into remote areas of Tokyo or connect to other lines despite different ownership of the track. For example it is possible to take a single train (no transfers) from Haneda airport to Narita airport. The ride will take over 2 hours but you will have technically traveled on 3 separate lines operated by 3 separate rail companies. Oh and one of those lines is a subway line.

For someone well versed in typography, his monospace font Triplicate is absolutely terrible looking to me. The t's, f's, and a's all look oddly slanted and upset the balance.

Japan is incredibly stubborn and ignorant when it comes to addressing core social and psychological problems in their society. It isn't even recognized by most of the population so when people begin to complain of their own social issues or depression, people around them will slowly distance themselves from that person. As a result, most people will choose to hide their issues until it is unbearable. At the point they feel they cannot continue is when they do something drastic which includes suicide.

If you bring the problem to light, people will just shy away from the debate (Japanese avoid arguments at all costs) and act ignorant. So to anyone that understands Japanese culture, Koremura's response is understandable. At least in the position he is in, he can do something.

Good. I've been waiting for a non-SMS and non-iMessage way of communicating. Americans shouldn't be tied to cell phone plans or the Apple vertical monopoly in order to communicate.

In Japan, for example, we are starting to see individuals not even purchase a smartphone but just an ipad, ipod, or some sort of wireless device along with a portable wifi hotspot. This enables them to use whatever device they want to communicate. It is certainly far from ubiquitous but the fact that it is possible to get by on a data plan is exactly how the wireless net should work.

Now a facebook, LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber regional monopoly isn't the ideal end-game either. But it looks like it will take that first step before some sort of standard beyond plain SMS emerges.

On carmax a 2005 Corolla with over 100k miles still sells for over $9000.

General car advice is the minimum you should spend on a used car is at least $5000. And that's if you're really lucky. If you want a problem free used car for a usable amount of time (3-4 years) then you need to go up to at least $8000.

Let me counter your argument as an American living in Japan (though not working).

Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones

In Japan engineers are treated like janitors because that's how Japanese businesses view other non-sales non-management positions within the company. The bosses decide the direction of the company, and everyone down to the janitors and engineers follow those orders. If you aren't a manager, you have less responsibility and thus less power to decide or give feedback to the overall health of the business.

In America, engineers often have more input to their superiors. In fact it isn't uncommon for engineers to assume management positions in American large corporations. I would even argue a manager with an engineering background will preform better than just a manager with an MBA. But even the lowly intern is allowed to speak up to his superiors because discussion even if it is against management's wishes is valued.

This isn't true in Japan. The path to "nobility" in Japan is to work (study) your way to the most reputable university out of high school to give yourself the best chance at entering the most reputable firms in Japan.

This is why schools like Keio that are an all inclusive program for children from primary school all the way through university are so popular (for Americans, this system nearly guarantees children entry to Keio University which is to Japanese a sort of Ivy league school). They're trusted to give their students the best possible outcomes in structured Japanese society because they're reputable.

So while you may delude yourself into thinking that Japan is egalitarian, it is anything but. It is a mixture of meritocracy to a certain point with old feudal caste style concepts mixed in.

But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way.

This isn't the better way. This is a tendency towards socialism. Not that I disagree with the socialist philosophy. In many ways I wish America was more like Europe. But from what I have seen in Japan, this mentality allows for the idea of 仕方ない (shikata ga nai) or status quo mentality.

That is most Japanese have the idea that they can't effect change within society because that's just the way things have always been done and that's just how it is. Contrast this with America's acceptance and encouragement to change and create changes. This difference is the reason why America has continued to last as it has for so long in addition to coming to dominating the world even when large industries have been off-shored.

There are some downsides to America's behavior. Notably we don't preserve traditions and culture. But at the same time this allows for innovation. It attracts the best and brightest in the world because that's the promise: you can do what you need to change the world and that glory will forever belong to your name as long as books and information continue to be preserved.

For example Japan has had a number of major visionaries, business men, and inventors but most of them are not respected within Japanese society because they didn't fit in. The most recent being Shuji Nakamura (Nobel prize winner for blue LED manufacturing discovery) who was Japanese but has since nationalized to America. Nakamura sued his previous Japanese employer over compensation for his discovery which was a mere 20,000 yen (~$200 USD) at the time. If that's the reward for advancing society, then nobody will want to attempt to do the impossible. Instead everyone will just throw their hands up and demote themselves to the easiest and most stable work possible which is exactly what you're seeing in Japan these days. But they have another option: immigrate to America where they will be respected.

It is sad to say but I believe if Japan continues on the trend they are on right now, they will continue to sink into irrelevancy. Japanese citizens are not trained to be specialized, they're trained to fit into society. Those that fit in the best and devote themselves to the structured nature of Japan are best respected. Those that find other ways or do not follow the traditional path (the Japanese version of the corporate ladder) are not respected. So when a serious problem in Japan arises, if the leaders do not recognize it, and have the correct solution, the entire ship sinks. Because only the leaders are in the position to effect change. Not the janitors. Not the engineers.

Finally a recent popular drama that aired in Japan was Hanzawa Naoki. (Spoiler alert) In the drama, the main protagonist spends his time ethically climbing the ranks of a large national bank in order to exact his revenge on a board member of the bank that he believes caused his father to commit suicide. He's successful but in the end, he's demoted from his current rank and transferred out of the main branch (because he forced the board member to kneel down and apologize in the most humiliating way during a board meeting). When I asked my Japanese friend what she thought of the drama's ending, she just replied, "that's just how it is." She didn't bother to think for once if a better outcome was possible.

I've been living in Japan and access across the pond is a bit flaky at times. Most of the time I can blame my local service provider (a sharehouse) for their piece of shit router, but there are countless numbers of times when a stream will suddenly cut or a connection will just time out for no good reason (while other simultaneous connections even across the ocean are fine).

I'm living in Japan at the moment (language student) and it is certainly different here compared to the west. For example in Silicon Valley it is acceptable to pretty much give up a college education for a startup. In East-Asia, that is shunned upon except perhaps in Taiwan. For Japan particularly, there is a "set path" of being normal/average and deviating from that path causes people to look negatively on you. For example people that only do "part time" work in Japan are considered freeters (free-timers) and not necessarily contributing to society.

Another significant things about east-asian work ethics especially Japanese, is that the rank system is still in place when it comes to corporate structures. For the typical Japanese, that means in order to be a "good" employee, you need to show up to work before your boss arrives and leave after he leaves, even if you have nothing to work on. Furthermore, after-work drinking parties with the boss are considered slightly below mandatory, you can decline the invitation but your boss will get the impression that if you do, you aren't a "good employee".

Finally death from overwork here is real. The general strategy here is if you're failing, you aren't working long enough hours. That's different from the west because if you combine that with the notion that you are more of a servant than a creator or contributor, then you suddenly end up with zombies instead of employees doing meaningful, creative work. More work general works if feedback and criticism is accepted on all levels, here that isn't the case.

The nail in the coffin is this is pretty much accepted by everyone thus if you don't accept it, you are seen as the "weird" one. Individuality is often not a good thing here. That means your Japanese wife tending to the children at home will become incredibly disappointed with you if you don't "succeed" in this system. There is an expectation that you'll more or less be the cash cow for the family otherwise you're useless.

What's good about windows:

* Explorer is better than Finder.

* Right click that works

* Start menu + Win7 taskbar is better than OSX Dock/Launchpad (can't comment on Win8 metro but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it)

* Maximize

* clicking the clock gives you a calendar

I'm not exactly pro-windows but I believe the GP's point is that OSX is not flawless (neither is windows by far) but there's a lot of dumb things in OSX that should've been fixed but weren't because MS did it therefore it is not elegant by definition.

I've been able to make OSX work for me only because I get my real work done on the command line. Finder is nothing but a source of frustration. Also I ought to be able to right-click the volume icon on the menu bar and get the same menu as option-click but I don't...probably because that would be too windows-like.

I would say that the average Japanese is more worldly not because of their own insight but more because of the rigidity of the culture and the import/export of American/European (Western) culture into the country.

Every Japanese essentially grows up in the same exact manner as his/her peers:

* primary school (elementary, middle, high school) * higher education (university/college) * full time work

There is some variation between the sexes but generally that is how it goes for most Japanese. The difference with western culture is that generally each level of school beyond the previous is harder and more worthy than the previous level. In Japan there is an exception: high school is actually harder than college/university.

The university system in Japan is pretty much as backwards as you can get. Admissions is the most important aspect of Japanese University. Graduation is pretty much guaranteed and companies hiring new employees fresh out of college base their decision on the name of the university, not based on the individuals accomplishments during university. This means University entrance exams basically become the standard to which all Japanese are judged. As such once a Japanese student reaches his final year in High School, 100% of their effort is devoted to studying for college entrance exams and nothing else.

Oddly, after entering a university, most Japanese will treat college as an "extended vacation". The reason behind this is: companies will only pay attention to your university's name (so your employment has already basically been decided upon admission), graduation is basically guaranteed regardless of performance, and Japanese work place ethic enforces overtime as standard not optional. So most Japanese students will take university time as their "time off" and allow themselves to be consumed with all things fun Japanese and non-Japanese.

One major way of extending the extended vacation is the option of foreign exchange schools. Many Japanese will use this opportunity as a temporary escape from Japanese culture. But while they may learn a thing or two about other cultures, most foreign exchange students have no other intention other than extending their time away from the pressures of Japanese culture and their own leisure.

The other thing I'd like to address is the notion of the Japanese being "ahead". They are only ahead in the following categories:

* land-use and transit efficiency * conforming society norms

In nearly every other metric they've fallen behind or are behind. The main reason for this is again the rigidity of Japanese culture and the refusal to experiment. There are several reasons for this but the biggest on is in a society where being unique is punished while the conforming act is never punished, it is always a safe move to conform. This means all employees will attempt to take the path with least resistance (conforming path) even if it is the least optimal.

The second compounding issue is the notion of "ganbare". Ganbare is a conjugation of the Japanese verb ganbaru which means to "try one's best". In Japanese culture ganbare is valued more than outcomes. That is a person that tries his hardest is more valuable than a person that uses little effort but is still successful. This basically authorizes the use of unpaid overtime in order to overcome shortcomings in business. Workers will "ganbare" by putting in more hours in order to overcome any challenges--and usually in this act, they feel supported by society and management. The problem is that we have data that shows that prolonged overtime causes burn out and thus productivity actually decreases despite more hours worked. But when your entire society is basically burned out you're not going to get any risk takers or even any insightful ideas. You instead have a zombie workforce.

I do think Japan can turn around because there are signs of concern and insight among the top ranks in Japan (both government and business) that the status quo is not sustainable. The real question is whether or not they can change some of their core cultural values to adjust to the changing times quick enough.

There's a solution to this problem... I got it! I'll rent a room and put a bunch of giant TVs on the walls so it's even better than home. You'll be able to watch 5 or more games all at the same time. To make things better, I'll stock a local selection of the best beers and drinks. I'll even serve you better food like fresh french fries and chicken wings, not that crappy bag of potato chips you get at the store. In fact, you won't even have to get up to go get your drink, I'll hire some young college girls to do that for you...

And maybe one day the we'll actually write the numbers on our coins so they can be friendlier to visitors...

American English speaker here.

1. I'd say that the non-phonetic approach allowed this to happen in the first place. In languages where the writing system was pinned to a phonetic system, there is no room for saying something incorrectly. There is room for replacing words and sounds but at least the writing reflects the spoken versions.

2. If you want to go that far, then we ought to just adopt Chinese characters which go a step further and abstract out pronunciation from meaning. That is, it is possible to understand groupings of Chinese characters without even knowing pronunciation. But this system also creates additional problems.

3. I think we have the technology to "bridge" our roots to whatever we create in the future. Today it is actually possible to make something live for eternity thanks to the internet. One good application would be English writing reform if we are to accept that it is the linqua franca.

Consider the possible benefits:

* 2nd language learners will have a much easier learning curve and thus be able to transition from their first language to English more quickly * World communication would increase--I think this has war-stopping potential (or peace creating potential) * Translations would hopefully become more accurate (less secondary translation/interpretation needed)--things written in "new" English would be more accessible to a larger audience. * Areas dominated by native English speakers would open up to a larger audience, thus creating more competition and more contributions by people of other backgrounds other than pure English.

For example, right now we are seeing dominance in technology/internet by English speakers, but why should that remain the case? As such traveling to a non-English speaking country often feels like going back 5-10 years because much of their tech experience is based on companies paying for translations or waiting for local companies to copy the technology.

I actually think we have the capability of making "new English" for both existing native speakers and new speakers. For example for native speakers, we could write an input method that automatically identifies words, spelling, or grammatical structures that have been deprecated and may not be understood by "new English" learners.

We also have the ability to write and document English to new English translations and historical references. There will certainly be some fallout but we currently don't document many language shifts that happen even among smaller populations.

I'm sure many exceptional native English writers and culturally engrained speakers will balk at such an idea. My challenge would be to have them learn Chinese or some other not so closely related foreign language to the same fluency they can speak English in order for them to understand the pain of learning a new and complex language. Of course I am not happy with the loss of culture, but I think for the advancement of the world at large, such a path is inevitable.

Me today: I don't get social networking. Me as a teenager: social interactions on the internet--so cool and interesting.

My hypothesis: social networks create a virtual world where we can construct the identity we hoped to construct. However as these networks age, mistakes in that identity come more often and suddenly that identity isn't so pristine. You can extrapolate this to anything that is on the internet and social from a simple forum to facebook.

Now recent attempts are "hey, let's just delete stuff and that will model reality a bit better" but it doesn't. You've just changed the rules to an alternate virtual world, not necessarily made the virtual reality.

My conclusion is therefore in order for you to experience life as reality you should stop trying to rely on a virtual copy to emulate those same experiences.

When my friends get on their phones and computers and are so intent and focus on their digital identity, they can't experience what is real. The conversation is boring. The conversation exists in a digital virtual world that I'm not part of because I (now) refuse to export all of my time and experiences to that virtual world.

I was lucky to learn these lessons as a child as the internet had just taken off and I (being a teenager) took advantage of everything it had to offer from online gaming to working internationally with others around the world. When meeting in real life, however, things felt a bit strange. It was like two strangers that were previously friends had finally had a real-world interaction. The awkwardness now became how to do we reconcile are real-world-selves with the virtual-selves we've known. The sad truth was that we couldn't easily. The internet allowed us to only focus on what we found important and ignore the rest of reality. I feel that more and more people are falling into this trap and it will be a rude awakening for them when they are much older.

So is there a desire for such virtual worlds? Obviously yes. But the real question we should be asking ourselves is should we continuously be trying to feed that desire?

Tesla and SpaceX are both iterative technology. They both use existing technology and iterate improvements on it or apply it to new fields. The electric car was already proven feasible by GM and other companies or products like golf carts. It was more of a problem of the existing players being forced to build an electric car than keep doing what they've been doing to generate profits.

SpaceX still uses rockets. The new tech in SpaceX is changing the rocket design between engines so it is manufacturable in larger quantities and utilizing faster computers to create reusable rocket stages that can land with their own power back on Earth. You could say that SpaceX is leveraging computer science artificial intelligence research, the general improvement in computing (cost and speed), and sensors. For example there are many videos of software controlled quadcopters performing various aerobatic stunts by analyzing and adjusting thrust in realtime based on sensor information.

You can blame government for the dysfunction, but I wouldn't be quick to completely blame local government for the stalls in public transit development.

The majority of NYC subway development occurred prior to the introduction of environmental policies such as NEPA (1970). In fact since 1956, NYC has only constructed 2 additional subway lines (1988, 1989) and currently has one more under construction.

Meanwhile SF BART didn't start operations until 1972. In fact I believe if BART didn't start planning and construction prior to national environmental policy implementation, BART may have never been built.

If we look overseas, since 1970, Tokyo opened 6 subway lines (4 Tokyo Metro, 2 Toei subway--Tokyo has two subway companies). While that doesn't seem like much of a difference, consider that those subway lines directly compete with surface rail transit systems operated by 8 different companies which are "feeder" lines and additional JR which not only is a feeder system, but also operates the main loop line for Tokyo.

It should also be noted that NEPA was actually a direct response to the Interstate Highway project where a common complaint was residents losing their communities or properties due to highway being paved right through the city. But NEPA requires environmental reviews for any new development so mass transit systems were affected as well.

So I would say the dysfunctional is not just at the city or state level, but also at the federal level as well.

Train regulations are retarded in the US and haven't been reformed for over 50 years. Basically if you plan on having a crossing or sharing track with a freight train you automatically are stuck with the FRA regulations which apply to freight trains and are also pointless. Those regulations require absurd rigidity of rolling stock to the point that train-sets built for those specifications actually are more expensive to maintain, fail more often simply (rolling stock becomes too heavy), and are much more unsafe.

For example FRA requires train rolling stock to withstand 800,000lbs of force on impact without permanent damage. The European requirement on the other hand is less than half of that. The European requirements instead aim for adding "crumple zones" to the cars to absorb energy and protect occupants similar to how automobiles use crumple zones.

This is why there's an obsession in the USA regarding light-rail. Light-rail sidesteps the FRA regulations by creating a separate track and rolling stock that doesn't have crossing with heavy rail.

I believe if we simply reformed FRA regulations we could probably cut all rail development by a sizable chunk as we would be able to buy rolling stock as-is from European and Asian suppliers.

But anyway, back to the point being discussed. A sizable chunk of China's HSR network was built elevated so it is certainly feasible to put today's HSR tech on pylons. But just because you elevate something doesn't magically get you away from Environmental Reviews which I think is another area where a majority of the cost in public works project lies.

Environmental reviews will still be required for Hyperloop. Since it is actually a new system, I would expect it to get even more scrutiny in the public eye because it will sound even more magical and also offend even more people since there won't be any intermediate stops. Remember that much of the California HSR political issues are because central valley cities and towns want an HSR station in their town (of course they don't want to fund the station). So many of these towns basically come to the table and say "we'll give you the land if you give us a station, otherwise we won't help you." The Hyperloop concept basically ignores this argument.

Keep in mind that despite environmental reviews having the word "environment" in them, they are actually also public hearings where the public can voice their opinions which can include things like additional noise and traffic. For example if your project blocks out the beach view of a home-owner's house overlooking the ocean, you can sure bet that they'll be at the environmental review and give you an earful about how you can't build your tube/track/freeway/skyscraper/windmill there. Yes that's a bit of hyperbole but that's basically how the environmental review phase is abused.

Because of that, I've come to the conclusion that we won't have any significant improvement in infrastructure in this country until CEQA/NEPA are reformed to allow not just public entities to build infrastructure, but also private entities as well.